Slitherine

(link to the relevant topic in the Steam forums with examples of unit matchups and the math involved - https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/d ... 927677194/)

Summary / TLDR:
Right now, the game is capping a weapon's total damage down to the health of an individual entity within a unit that has multiple "soldiers" in it, like a unit of Guardsmen (8 soldiers), a unit of Tactical Space Marines (5 marines), or a unit of Ork Boyz (6 Orks). After the dmg is capped, the weapon's dmg reduction from accuracy and the target unit's armor mitigation is being applied (instead of being applied to the weapon's total base dmg), resulting in a much lower total dmg value being applied to the target.

The Longer Version:
This isn't a logical way to assign damage to a unit with multiple targets within it.
According to how the game works, weapons that make a single attack against a unit with multiple soldiers within it can only hit one of those soldiers, instead of the entire unit as a whole. As you kill off the soldiers, the total health of the unit decreases until there's only 1 soldier left and finally you eliminate the entire unit.

To take an actual example from game testing done in a non-modified game (no bonuses to dmg, or armor, or hp, or any defense bonuses from tiles, relics, or researched tech), assume that a single unit of a Predator tank is engaging a single unit of Ork Boyz.

The Predator has a single weapon, a twin-linked Lascannon, that makes a single attack with a base damage of 8, armor penetration of 6, and 83% accuracy.
The Ork Boyz have 6 individual Orks within the entire unit on a single hex tile. The total health of that unit is 18 hp, with an armor value of 2.

This means each Ork Boy actually has 3 health (6 x 3 = 18).

The game will give you an estimation of how much damage you will do to this unit, and how many predicted Ork Boys you will actually kill within the unit. In this particular case, the game estimated 2.5 dmg done with 0 casualties.

This is what should happen:

8 dmg is applied to the 83% accuracy modifier which = 6.6 modified base dmg
The Ork Boyz 2 armor is completely negated by the Lascannon's 6 armor penetration, so you end up with a total of 6.6 dmg being applied to a single Ork Boy within the unit, effectively killing him since his health is only 3, and you're left with 5 Ork Boys and a health of 15/18.

This is what's actually happening:

8 dmg is compared to the total health of a single Ork Boy, which is 3. The damage is capped at 3, since a single Lascannon making a single attack can't kill more then 1 Ork Boy per attack.
So 3 dmg is then applied to an accuracy of 83%, which = 2.49 modified capped dmg

2.49 is rounded up to 2.5, which is exactly what the game estimates the damage to be. Since 2.5 dmg doesn't = the health of 3 per Ork Boy, none of the Ork Boyz are killed and the casualties remain at 0, exactly what the estimated result is.

I don't agree with this. If a Lascannon round (which can melt tanks btw) is fired at an Ork Boy, or worse yet in this example, a single Imperial Guardsmen, they should be incinerated. A modified base damage of 6.6 is more then enough to kill one dude within a unit.
Instead, the game is nerfing the damage of single target weapons vs units with multiple entities within them. I know that a balance has to be made with infantry vs anti-tank vehicles and the whole rock/paper/scissors thing....but for that tank to kill the Ork Boyz unit (without capping the weapon's dmg) it would have to fire 6 consecutive times, taking up 6 whole turns to kill a single infantry unit. That's more than balanced. If a player (or the AI) can't bother to move a single infantry unit within a time frame of 6 turns, that unit deserves to be killed.

I hope someone from Slitherine can confirm that this isn't intentional and will be fixed in an upcoming patch, because it's currently affecting a lot of possible matchups between various units across all factions, resulting in a very diminished capability of tanks, like the Predator, to deal with even a single infantry unit.

You could argue the logic that a single Boy/Guardsman is such a small moving target or could be hiding his vital parts behind a random stone that a big Lascannon can't easily hit him in a deadly spot. Maybe it hits his arm or leg and it gets totally vaporized but that's not enough to take im out. A tank on the other side would get the full damage because it is bigger and can't evade or hide its vital parts behind a random obstacle.

Yes it is working as intended otherwise the HP capping could not really have much effect. The aim is to make single shot weapons less effective against multiple units than multi shot weapons.

I agree with the OP. This might be working as designed, but I think the logic behind it is questionable. Weapons damage vary and the final damage will depend on accuracy, not the health of the target figure. That means a 5dp or a 500dp weapon hit at 86% accuracy on a dude in a flack jacket in a foxhole (8 health), or a grandma in a nice sweater (1 health), are equally reduced to less than the health of the dude/grandma; if 86% of either is greater than or equal to the dude's health, then that should be a kill (sorry, granny). Having the attack affect only a single figure in a multi-figure target already achieves the desired result of making a single shot weapon less effective than a multi-weapon/-shot weapon unit. And I like this feature, FWIW. If the attack's damage, adjusted by accuracy, is still greater than or equal to the health of a single figure should mean an insta-kill on that one figure, but it's only the one figure. As the OP points out, the low return for the effort is a lesson in itself.

My $0.02.

Actually, I think this has undesirable side effects:
Armor and penetration are much more important than every other stats, especially given the fact that infantry armor and vehicle armor work the same way and have roughly the same values

Great post Dwarf Power and very well explained.
I'll keep your explanations in mind because they really helped to understand the game engine.


It's not that easy to give an opinion here.

On the realism side, we are speaking of a weapon targeting one guy amid the six, which are possibly not standing idle.
So it would be actually logical and realistic that you could even miss that guy, and deal 0 damage to it in case you miss (and full damage in case you hit, in which case killing it).
In addition to that, one could argue you cannot use your weapon at point blank on small infantry guys at range 0-1 (or once they started meleeing you) but only at range 2.

So we see we are here in split decisions and compromise.
Having a game where you could do 0 to 6 damage to a single unit would be more realistic.
But is it better for gameplay? I think the way they implemented things work well so far.

But one question:
is it possible to mod this?

The issue with doing it the other way round is that the number of shots would become fairly irrelevant and you would not see as much difference between multi shot weapons being good against numerous targets. We think for balance and encouraging varied tactics this is better.